


Wrong Seasons

by Crave



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, Daemon Separation, Daemon Touching, Daemons, His Dark Materials Inspired, Hurt Bucky Barnes, Hurt Steve Rogers, M/M, Stucky Scary Bang 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-22 15:13:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12484548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crave/pseuds/Crave
Summary: The man was like a spirit. His eyes were murky and grey, like stagnant water. His blood seeped through his armour where Steve had sliced through it. His wet hair hung around his head in ragged clumps. He had no daemon case. The assassin looked...Steve would have said he looked bored, but that would have implied some awareness of his surroundings.Steve’s heart was like a clenched fist under his ribs. He could see Cairenn shivering beside him, and feel the horror rolling off her in waves. He could hear her soft, pained sounds, the hiss of the sand beneath her hooves.The assassin rubbed a hand carelessly over the place where his daemon case had been. The case that was empty. Because the assassin had no daemon.





	1. Into the Earth

**Author's Note:**

> For the Scary Bang prompt: The Winter Soldier has no Daemon  
> Background info for this AU:  
> \- Daemons are manifestations of the soul that take the form of an animal.  
> \- A child's daemon can change shape but around puberty they settle and become one shape forever.  
> \- It is extremely taboo to touch another person's daemon unless you are lovers.  
> \- Steve has the Subtle Knife in this AU, which is a knife that can cut through into alternate universes.  
> See end notes for a list of each character's daemon and their names.

It didn't behave   
like anything you had   
ever imagined. The wind   
tore at the trees, the rain   
fell for days slant and hard.   
The back of the hand   
to everything. I watched   
the trees bow and their leaves fall   
and crawl back into the earth. 

 - Hurricane, Mary Oliver

They burst through the window—Steve plastered tight against his bison daemon’s fur as broken glass and plaster exploded around him. He could feel Fury's flash drive in his pocket, the plastic digging into his skin.

The assassin turned. His eyes were rimmed with black; his skin stark and pale against the streetlights like a naked skull. The assassin’s daemon case was on a chain around his throat.

The assassin was looking at Cairenn. Steve reached down and patted her thick fur. Her hooves clicked on the roof tiles.

Steve gripped the Knife in one hand. He could feel the weight of it. The will of it.

His whole world was on fire. His fingers—his remaining fingers—gripped tight on the blade’s handle. Steve felt the wounds on his hands still oozing blood into his bandages. They'd never stopped bleeding since the Knife had chosen him; Erskine's Subtle Knife.

Steve swung himself off Cairenn’s back and hurled himself at the Soldier.

The assassin threw a punch and Steve ducked under it, bringing the Knife up. It raked over the assassin’s ribs through his armour. Steve felt the assassin flinch, but then the assassin was bringing his metal fist up into Steve’s stomach, and Steve stepped back. The assassin raised his arm for the kill and Steve lashed out, throwing all his weight behind the blade in his hand.

There was a loud metallic clang as the assassin's hand hit the roof tiles.

The assassin stared down at his severed metal arm. His face was surprised, but muted, like Steve was a fly that had landed in his drink. He kicked Steve hard in the stomach, the exact spot where he’d punched him, and Steve doubled over.

Bile flooded Steve’s mouth and he spat it out.

Steve doubled over, pretending to vomit, but he came up head first, smashing into the assassin’s ribs. The assassin grabbed him and there was a terrible lurch, and the two of them tipped over the edge of the roof.

“Cairenn!” Steve screamed, and he could hear his daemon thundering towards him as he fell. Holding the assassin in one hand, Steve gripped the Knife in front of him.

He slashed wide with the blade and the world tore open.

Steve and the assassin fell through the hole in the world, and into a deep lake. Steve, frantically treading water, still keeping hold of the assassin and the Knife, heard the loud smack of his daemon plunging into the water behind him.

Steve began to head for the shore. The assassin broke free of his grasp and Steve, knowing he didn’t have the strength to fight and swim at the same time, let him go.

Steve leant against Cairenn to tie the Knife around his waist. Steve and Cairenn made their way to the shore and pulled themselves up onto the sand. Steve patted his pocket. The flash drive was still there, although Steve wasn't sure the swim had done it any good.

The assassin was kneeling amongst the rocks, cradling the metal stump of his hand. He shot Steve a look and as he turned his head, Steve saw.

He saw.

In the fall, the assassin must have dropped it.

It had been a long way down and the lake was deep and it must have come loose.

The assassin’s daemon case was gone.

“I’ll help you,” Steve said.

The assassin stared at him. The black paint around his eyes was flowing over his mask like black tears.

“I’ll help you find your daemon,” Steve said.

The assassin, of all things, began to laugh. It was the worst sound in the world.

“I’ll…I’ll get a net, we can dredge the lake…” Steve said.

The assassin stared at Steve, and his eyes made Steve think of one of Bucky’s old looks; the ‘what you’ve just said is so stupid I can’t believe I have to acknowledge it’ look.

“She’s not in the lake,” the assassin said.

“Then where?” Steve’s mind was jumping around. Was the assassin’s daemon on the roof? Had she fallen?

“I don’t know,” the assassin said.

Steve felt Cairenn’s teeth pulling at his shirt. She was nudging him frantically, almost pushing him over.

“Steve,” she said. Steve petted her absently, his hand running over the smooth curve of her horns and over her wet nose, but she kept forcing him back, away from the assassin.

“Steve,” she said again. This time Steve turned away from the assassin to look at her. Her eyes were wide, nostrils flared, water flinging from her coat as she reared back.

It was that that made him re-examine the assassin. The man was like a spirit. His eyes were murky and grey, like stagnant water. His blood seeped through his armour where Steve had sliced through it. His wet hair hung around his head in ragged clumps. He had no daemon case. The assassin looked...Steve would have said he looked bored, but that would have implied some awareness of his surroundings.

Steve’s heart was like a clenched fist under his ribs. He could see Cairenn shivering beside him, and feel the horror rolling off her in waves. He could hear her soft, pained sounds, the hiss of the sand beneath her hooves.

The assassin rubbed a hand carelessly over the place where his daemon case had been. The case that was empty. Because the assassin had no daemon.

Steve's stomach churned and he pressed a hand over his mouth. Everything about the man in front of him was wrong.

“Was it Hydra?” Steve asked.

“Yes,” the assassin said.

Steve remembered the room Bucky had been in when Steve rescued him. Bucky’s daemon, Nechama, had been pushed into a huge mesh cage and Bucky had been in another. A great and terrible blade hung between the cages. And Steve had known what that machine was: a machine to sever people from their daemons.

The memory for Steve was like being a kid when his milk teeth were falling out and sometimes he’d be reading a book or doing his homework and his mom would nudge him with her foot, and Steve would realise he’d been flicking a loose tooth with his tongue. These days Steve found himself drinking coffee, or running through the park, and he would realise that he’d been thinking of Bucky and Nechama in their cages, sometimes for hours.

Steve had believed that the cage had been destroyed along with the factory. And yet, here was proof: Steve had failed. He hadn’t saved Bucky, and he hadn’t stopped Hydra, and he hadn’t stopped what happened to this man. That didn’t mean there was nothing he could do.

“Will you let me take you in if I get your daemon back?” Steve asked. He couldn't look at the assassin without wanting to fix him somehow.

The assassin considered this.

“I think… yes,” he said.

“Okay,” Steve said. “Do you know where she is?”

“The last time they let me see her was in New Jersey,” the assassin said.

“Okay,” Steve said, “wait here, I’ll be back.”

Steve grabbed the Knife and began to cut back through to his own world, stepping aside to let Cairenn through ahead of him. The assassin made no move to follow them. Steve wondered what would happen if he couldn’t come back to rescue the assassin, or if they couldn't find his daemon. But Steve had a chance to bring the assassin in and he had to take it.

*

The first thing he did back in his own world was try to call Natasha. His cellphone was full of water and he couldn't go back to his apartment so he ended up giving a stranger a wet ten dollar bill in exchange for some change that he could use on a payphone.

“What happened to your phone?” Natasha asked as soon as he picked up.

“It fell in a lake,” Steve said.

“A lake?”

“It’s a long story. I need your help,” Steve said. Then, taking the whole day in, he added, “Fury's been shot.” And, realising how strange he must look covered in water in the middle of a public street, “Can you bring me a spare set of clothes?”

There was silence.

“Keep moving,” Natasha said, “I'll find you.”

She hung up and Steve looked around, trying to get some idea of where he was, and saw the sign for Central Park. He headed for the lake, figuring that the closer he got to a body of water the less conspicuous he looked.

By the time Nat found him, Steve had received a blanket from fisherman and was huddled up with a group of men, regaling them with his cover story about the fall. Steve had also come up with a plan.


	2. Toward The End

As though, that was that.   
This was one hurricane   
I lived through, the other one   
was of a different sort, and   
lasted longer. Then   
I felt my own leaves giving up and   
falling.  _The back of the hand to_  
everything. But listen now to what happened   
to the actual trees;   
toward the end of that summer they   
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs. 

 - Hurricane, Mary Oliver

“So you want to break into a high security facility?” Sam said, when Steve and Natasha turned up at his apartment. His falcon daemon, Eliana, swept urgently around the apartment.

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” said Steve, tearing open the pack of protein bars Natasha had bought for him.

“And you're after this...” Sam turned to Natasha.

“Winter Soldier,” Natasha said.

“This Winter Soldier guy. And you want my help?” Sam asked.

“I'm not after him, exactly,” Steve said. “Well, I guess I am, since he shot Fury. But he's in another world right now, so it's not like he can do much assassinating from there. But mostly I just need somewhere to go. My apartment isn't very secure right now.”

Sam gave him a long look.

“Put on some dry clothes,” Sam said, “you're dripping all over my carpet.”

“Sorry Sam,” Steve said.

“Sorry,” Cairenn added; her thick fur was the source of a growing pool of water on Sam's floor. The two of them ducked into Sam's bathroom. Steve towelled himself off with one of Sam's hand towels, did the best he could for Cairenn with the biggest towel he could find, and pulled on the clothes Natasha had bought for him. They fit okay, though they were a bit tight across the chest, like all the shirts Natasha got him.

Steve could hear them talking through the walls.

“Sometimes they showed off that he didn’t have a daemon,” Natasha was saying as Steve came out of the bathroom, “to let us know what they could do to us.”

Natasha’s daemon, Anastasios, an impossibly bright, impossibly iridescent dragonfly, fluttered close to her face and settled comfortingly in her hair.

“They used to do that to slaves,” Eliana said, “sever one of them as an example to the others.”

Steve had to lean against Cairenn for a second just to ground himself. Her still-damp fur soaked through his shirt.

“The other thing is that Fury gave me this,” Steve said, placing the flash drive on Sam's coffee table and sitting down beside Natasha.

Natasha sat up straighter, letting Steve see that she was interested.

“I'm not sure if it got damaged in the lake,” Steve said.

Natasha picked it up and turned it over in her hands.

“It looks well sealed,” she said. “I don't think Fury would have picked something that would break that easily. He's got access to STARK tech.”

“I've got a bowl of rice if you need it?” Sam said.

When they'd dried it out and plugged it into Sam's laptop, Natasha paused.

“Where did you say the Winter Soldier last saw his daemon?” Natasha said, her voice perfectly level.

“New Jersey,” Steve said.

“According to this drive, there's a SHIELD base there,” Natasha said. “One that I didn't know about.”

“We're going,” Steve said. “That can't be a coincidence. Maybe the SHIELD base is there to track Hydra.”

“Say SHIELD does know where to find Hydra,” Sam said, “and you manage to find the Winter Soldier's daemon. It's no guarantee the Winter Soldier will come in.”

“Either way, I think he should have his daemon. If I have to kill him, he should be with her,” Steve said.

“And if you can’t kill him?” Sam asked.

“He doesn’t seem like he’d last long on his own,” Steve said, “and he's not currently in our universe, so Hydra should have a tougher time finding him.”

“He'd last longer than you'd think,” Natasha said, “And he’s…vulnerable. He could do a lot of harm if he gets into the wrong hands.”

“What would you do?” Steve asked her.

“Kill him,” Natasha said. “I’ve seen what he’s capable of.” She lifted the corner of her shirt to show a deep scar on her hip. “Five years ago, I was escorting a nuclear engineer out of Iran. Somebody shot out my tires near Odessa.” Anastasios was hovering over Natasha's head as she spoke, his wings buzzing frantically to keep his body in place. “We lost control, went straight over a cliff. I pulled us out. But the Winter Soldier was there. I was covering my engineer so he shot him straight through me. Soviet slug. No rifling. Bye-bye, bikinis.”

“Bet you look terrible in them now,” Sam said.

“And you, Sam?” Steve asked.

“I don't think he's the kind you save,” Sam said at last. “He's the kind you stop.”

“Giving him back his daemon isn’t going to save him,” Steve said.

“It's the truth. But do you really believe that, Steve?” Eliana asked.

Steve didn’t know. He remembered the Winter Soldier’s empty eyes, Steve's instinctive recoiling from him, Cairenn’s distress. But offering to return the Soldier's daemon was an act of hope, even if Steve knew the man could never be whole.

It could have been Bucky, some part of him whispered, his brain supplying the image of Hydra’s terrible cage again.

“I can't leave him there, either way. And while Hydra have his daemon, they have power over him. This is a chance to break their hold.”

“We'll see what's at the base,” Natasha said. And that was final.

*

Breaking into the base in New Jersey was the easiest part. Once they'd committed to doing it they got as close as they could by road, Cairenn curled up in the truck bed. Then Steve cut through into another world where they travelled by foot for about a mile, where Steve made another Window and the six of them emerged behind a red brick building.

Sam couldn't be talked out of coming, and the guilt for it kept rising up through Steve's gut. But Steve had also left an assassin alone on a lakeside.

Inside the bunker was the computer. And inside the computer was Zola. And inside that was chaos.

Steve had been working for Hydra. The people who had severed the Winter Soldier, and had tried to do the same to Bucky. It felt...there was a kind of dread in it. But it felt inevitable, almost.

Steve left Natasha with Zola, and began searching the base. The halls were dingy, empty; the lights flickered and the walls were damp. Even so, there were signs of life. As Steve pushed open doors and scanned empty rooms he found candy bar wrappers and suit jackets.

And then, in a dimly lit room, a row of cages.

“Steve!” said an impossibly familiar voice. “Cairenn!”

Steve stared through the bars of the first cage at a fox daemon. In the dim light, with her grey fur, she was just a shadow. But Steve would have recognised her anywhere. Cairenn was ahead of Steve, throwing herself at the cage, bellowing.

“Nechama?” Steve tried to say. His mouth made the shape of her name, her perfect, impossible name, but his throat wouldn't work enough to make the sound.

Steve cut through the bars of Nechama’s cage in a daze. His hands and feet were numb, his ears were ringing, he was clenching his jaw so hard it ached instantly. The fox daemon was clawing and biting at the bars and at Steve’s fingers. Frantic, unable to hold herself back. She had not felt the touch of a human in a hundred years, and when the bars gave way she threw herself at Steve, pressing her wet nose to Steve’s chest and whining; more animal than daemon.

Steve remembered the first time his daemon had been touched. His fever had been so high and his breaths had stung like fire. He’d known he was dying. Cairenn had been shifting forms restlessly, and at one point, to Steve's horror, she became some kind of fish, gasping frantically as Steve himself struggled for air. There'd been something terrible in the way his body kept trying to keep him alive. The sound of his breathing, his inability to use the bathroom on his own, it all seemed calculated to humiliate him. He had wanted his mother, but she'd been gone by then.

Steve had begun to cough. The cough was like a hot iron that burned in his chest. There’d been the sound of running water, and time passed, and then Bucky was lifting Steve and Steve was a dead weight. He couldn’t help and Bucky was trying to carry him, and Cairenn had transformed into a bison to help take Steve’s weight.

It had been an awkward process, getting Steve into the ice bath, and at some point Bucky’s hand had ended up brushing Cairenn’s fur. From the ice of the bathtub Steve had felt Bucky's hand on Cairenn and he'd known, just like that, that she would never change again. Her frantic changing would stop and she would stay like that, strong and beautiful, and whole, until he died. Because Bucky had touched her. Steve remembered thinking that he’d always wanted to know what Cairenn would settle as, and how surreal it was to know and to be dying all at once.

Steve had made it, and he had touched Bucky's daemon, eventually, when the two of them were lovers. He had thought the last time, in a tent in the god damned middle of fucking nowhere, had been the last time.

It seemed like a cruel joke to be touching her now. To know that Bucky was alive, somewhere, while his soul was trapped in a cage, was worse than death. He thought briefly, honestly, of killing Nechama. Freeing her from life the way he’d freed her from the cage. But the Winter Soldier’s daemon must be here too.

“Let’s go,” Nechama was saying, her claws digging through Steve’s clothing and scratching his bare chest.

“I promised I’d find someone’s daemon,” Steve said.

“There’s only me,” Nechama said. “The others died.”

“But the Winter Soldier is alive,” Steve said, “I’ve seen him.”

“Steve,” Nechama said. Just his name.

“I promised him,” Steve said.

Nechama bit down hard on his forearm, tearing the skin.

“Steve.” Her voice was tiny. Less than a whisper. Her breaths were gasping hiccups. “Who do you think the Winter Soldier is?”

“Well, he—” and then he knew.

The knowledge was like a rooftop in a dream. The deadly, inevitable sense of falling he would sometimes get, as if he’d already stepped over the edge, even as the ground came rushing up.

It was too terrible. The severed, obedient thing with incurious eyes couldn’t be Bucky.

“Do you want to go back to him?” Cairenn asked Nechama.

“Cairenn!” Steve couldn't stop the shout coming out of his mouth.

He hated her for saying it. Hated himself for thinking it. Hated the room, and the cage, and Hydra, a world where this could have happened. He hated everything except the fox curled up in his arms: Bucky's trembling soul. Steve put his face in her soft grey fur and wept.

Nechama didn’t speak, but Steve felt felt her tongue lick over his cheek, over the still-bleeding stumps where the Subtle Knife had cut away his fingers. Steve climbed onto Cairenn, because his own legs wouldn't have carried them, and they left the room.

“Steve,” Natasha said, when she saw them, “I've disarmed Zola, I've—” she stopped.

“The Winter Soldier is Bucky,” Steve said, not letting go of Nechama.

“You're touching his daemon,” Natasha said.

“She remembers me,” Steve said. Then, “I'm going to give her back to him.” And then, because she was still looking at him like that, he said “I've touched her before, it's not...we were...he was...” Steve didn't have words. Or he did have words, and was too much of a coward to say them.

“What will you do?” Natasha said, looking at the three of them.

“I don't know,” Steve said, “I think...I guess that's up to Bucky.”

“When will you be back?” Natasha said. “What about Fury?”

“I don't know,” Steve said. “I don't know. Tell Sam where I've gone.”

“And where are you going?”

Natasha stared openly at Steve’s hands where they stoked Nechama’s fur.

“I… I don’t know,” Steve said. “Tell him… tell him whatever you think is best.”

“Will you be back?” Natasha said.

“I’m not sure,” Steve said, hardly able to speak he was so tired.

“Why don’t you come with us?” Natasha said, “Just until we’re back in Brooklyn. It’ll be easier to give the Winter Soldier his daemon if you cut through with the Knife from where you were, instead of wondering across some other world looking for him.”

Steve tried to think it through and came up blank. He looked down at Nechama at the same time as she looked up at him. He kissed her forehead and she licked his chin.

“What would you like to do?” he asked Nechama.

“Whatever’s quickest,” she said.

Sam met up with them beside the gap in the chain-link and they crept back through. Steve was still slumped across Cairenn’s back, Nechama tucked up against him.

“Steve?” Eliana asked, swooping over to look at Nechama while Sam averted his gaze.

“This is Nechama,” Steve said to Sam.

“Hydra turned Bucky into the Winter Soldier by severing him,” Cairenn said.

Eliana let out a series of rasping shrieks.

“Would he be okay with you touching his daemon?” Sam asked. Sam’s face was careful, he put a hand on Steve’s shoulder.

“I don’t know,” Steve said. “I don’t think he remembered me. But Bucky, Bucky from before, wouldn’t have minded. This isn’t the first time.”

Steve was pretty sure if he stopped touching Nechama he’d lose himself completely. He thought that if someone came in right at that second and held a gun to his head, he couldn’t bring himself to let go of her.

“Okay Steve,” Sam was saying, “but—”

“Bucky doesn’t get a vote,” Nechama said, “and I don’t need his permission.” There was a manic note to her voice.

“I’m sorry,” Sam said, “you’re right.”

“He can’t feel it anyway,” Nechama said. “That’s what severed means. I can’t feel anything that happens to him.” Steve could feel her shaking as she spoke.

“Is that why you remembered us?” Cairenn asked.

Steve tried hard not to start crying again, what with Sam and Natasha being right there watching him. But it was a losing battle. He felt the tears welling up in his eyes and he watched them falling onto Nechama’s fur.

“I don’t know,” Nechama said.

“Maybe this isn’t the time for twenty questions,” Sam said.

“Might not get another chance later,” Natasha said, “I think Steve’s gonna stay with Bucky.”

“Where are you gonna go?” Eliana asked Cairenn.

“All of Shield’s safehouses are compromised now, Hydra are going to be looking everywhere for him,” Cairenn said.

“He’s not going to bring him in,” Natasha said.

“Steve?” Sam asked.

Steve took a deep, shaky breath.

“I’m staying with Bucky,” Steve said, “and if it’s not safe in this world, we’ll stay in another one.”

“Is that safe?” Sam asked.

Steve didn’t say anything. The more time spent in other worlds, the more damage it did. Steve had worked that out eventually, after months in other worlds during wartime.

“I can’t let you kill yourself over this Steve,” Sam said.

Steve felt an emotion rise up and up through him. He could feel it in his teeth, and swimming in his stomach. His chest and back felt tight. His tears were hot and furious on his cheeks. A possessive, childish determination.

“Even when I had nothing,” Steve said, practically spat it through his clenched teeth, “I had Bucky. And what does he have now?” Steve had to struggle not to tighten his hands in Nechama’s fur. “Nothing? Less than nothing? You wanted me to kill him. Or, or leave him. You don’t want me touching his daemon. Like she’s tainted. How could I leave her? I just got her back. And I’m so grateful for you Sam, for your help. Yours and Natasha’s. But they’re…” Steve’s mouth refused to move. He took a breath and pushed past it. “In sickness and in health,” he said, “that’s what we were.”

Sam stared at him.

“Well,” Natasha said, and there was a small smile on her lips, “that wasn’t in the history books.”

The rest of the ride home was pretty quiet. They were in the truck and then they were back in New York and Steve said goodbye to the two of them.

And then Steve made a cut with the Knife, and the three of them stepped through, and Steve pressed the edges of the cut he had made together until the hole in the world was gone and they were in the field with the lake, where the Winter Soldier was.

What had once been Bucky Barnes was walking across the field, staggering forward like something undead. And then Nechama was flinging herself out of Steve’s shaking arms and into his, licking at the Winter Soldier’s mask and face, nuzzling and nipping at the Winter Soldier’s skin and Bucky was lifting her up with his remaining hand.

Cairenn moved before Steve could understand what was happening, pressing herself against all that remained of Bucky. His untethered soul. His matted, greasy hair.

“What are you doing?” Bucky asked Cairenn.

“It’s okay,” Nechama said, “we know them.”

Bucky nodded.

There could be no reunion. There wasn’t enough left of any of them for that.

But Steve could feel Bucky through Cairenn. Bucky was alive, and Nechama was alive. Steve could feel it. It sent the same shock of pleasure through him to have Bucky’s hands on his daemon as it had before the war.

“You agreed I could take you in if I bought her back,” Steve said.

“I did,” the Winter Soldier said.

“Will you come in?” Steve asked.

“If you want me to.”

“And what do you want?”

“Steve won’t make us go back,” Necahama said, her voice muffled in Bucky’s skin.

“If you don’t go back to your world, you die,” Steve said. “Humans aren’t meant to spend too long outside their own worlds.”

“Dying would be better,” Nechama said.

Steve didn’t have much to say to that. Steve had died once — not from fever, Bucky had saved him from that — but from ice. It had been...It had been agony to know that he would never grow old with anyone, never have children, never get that dance with Carter. Still, he’d made his peace with it, because there wasn’t much else he could do. He didn’t want to be angry at the end, but it had hurt to let go all the same. Bucky hadn't been there to save him.

But he’d known what he was doing when he put that plane down. When he made his choice. And he had to do what Carter had told him to do: respect Bucky’s choice. And even if Bucky couldn’t make very many choices any more, Nechama would look after him.

“If that’s what you want,” Steve said, “I want to come with you.”

“We don’t want to let you go,” Cairenn said. “We only just got you back.”

“You can stay with us,” Nechama said, “right Buck?”

“Yeah...yeah, you can stay.”

“And if...” Steve wasn’t sure how to say it. “If you want to look for something that might undo some of what Hydra did to you, then I can help with that. I’m not saying you have to do that, just that it’s an option.”

“Thanks, Steve,” Nechama said, “We’re not quite ready for that yet. But maybe we will be.”


	3. After The Leaves

It was the wrong season, yes,   
but they couldn't stop. They   
looked like telephone poles and didn't   
care. And after the leaves came   
blossoms. For some things   
there are no wrong seasons.   
Which is what I dream of for me.

 - Hurricane, Mary Oliver

Nechama was resting between them, her front paws pressed to Bucky’s lap and her tail lazily batting at Steve’s bare feet, tickling them. Steve hadn’t been able to ask if Bucky could feel anything from his daemon, although Steve knew, logically, that he couldn’t. Cairenn nuzzled Bucky’s matted hair with her nose, and Bucky must be able to feel that. It would have to be enough.

They'd been in the same world for a long time, more than six months. But they’d spent longer in other places. Getting Bucky’s metal arm repaired had taken more than a year even in the advanced world they’d been to, which had been a problem because that world didn’t have visible daemons.

In the world they were in right now, people’s daemons were visible, which was easier for Steve. They'd had a lot of trouble hiding a full-sized bison in the world without daemons, although Bucky and Nechama had drawn less attention.

The most important thing in their current world was the Spyglass, a device that could let you see the flow of Dust between people and their daemons. The scientists Steve had tracked down had been very interested in Bucky. They'd even let Steve look through one of their Spyglasses to see how the Dust settled thickly over the scientists as they studied, and how it clung to Cairenn, made her seem more beautiful somehow.

There was no Dust flowing between Nechama and Bucky at all. When Steve turned the Spyglass to look at them and saw that he’d had to call their day at the research centre short. But over time the scientists of this world had tried some new treatments. One of which involved saturating a room with Dust and having Bucky spend hours and hours sitting in it and doing things to create more. At one point they’d had Bucky and Nechama in there learning to play a complicated instrument. That had worked the best. After the fifteenth lesson, through the Spyglass, Steve could see a kind of wispy tendril of Dust stretching between Nechama and Bucky. He’d cried openly at that.

“You still call me Bucky,” Bucky said, running a finger up over Nechama's nose and back between her ears.

“Yeah,” Steve said.

“Why?” Bucky asked.

“Natasha told me once that after seven years your whole body is replaced,” Steve said. “All your cells, all your bones, all the Dust that makes up your daemon, everything. And I figure, if you can replace every part of a person and still call them the same name, then I don't think what happened to you has to be an exception. But I can call you something else, if that's what you want.”

“I...no, not really,” Bucky said.

Nechama's tail gave an enthusiastic swish against Steve's feet.

“Okay, Buck,” Steve said, “let me know if you change your mind.”

Steve closed his eyes for a second and pictured that thin trail of Dust he'd seen through the Spyglass, thought about it like a tether that stretched between Bucky and his soul. The tiny wisp of Dust, gold through the Spyglass lens, like hope.

**Author's Note:**

> Daemon names:  
> Steve Rogers - Cairenn (American Bison)  
> Bucky Barnes - Nechama (Silver Fox)  
> Natasha Romanov - Anastasios (Emperor Dragonfly)  
> Sam Wilson - Eliana (Peregrine Falcon)
> 
>  
> 
> Massive thanks to my beta, 743ish, without whom this would make no sense.
> 
> Also thanks to gentlejoshingpeevishness, for your excellent suggestions.
> 
> All remaining faults are entirely mine.


End file.
